PC Advisor: Europe's most innovative country

PC Advisor‘s Peter Sayer writes that Malta might be Europe’s most innovative country if its proportion of high technology export revenue is taken into consideration:

Malta, […] a member of the EU since May 2004, derives a greater proportion of its export revenue from high technology than any other European country, according to figures from Eurostat, the statistical service of the European Commission. High-tech goods and services accounted for 55.9 percent of Malta’s exports in 2004.

R&D in the European Union, however, remains relatively low:

Spending on R&D is one way in which companies – and countries – stay ahead of their market. Average spending on R&D was 1.9 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) in the EU in 2004, compared with 2.59 percent in the US and 3.15 percent in Japan, according to Eurostat. In Europe, 54 percent of that expenditure was financed by businesses, and the rest by governments. In the US, 63 percent of R&D was financed by business, and in Japan 75 percent.